In today's world, we live with a continuous stream of images from all over the world. Through news, social media, and other online platforms, we are daily witnesses to war, disasters, political conflicts, inequality, and climate crises via the screens of our phones, televisions… We watch the suffering and violence of others, almost in real time, as it happens. But because the confrontation with these images is so constant, these events remain distant and almost abstract. We watch, but we do not experience it.

This distance creates a bizarre paradox. More than ever before, we are aware of what is happening all over the world, yet that constant access to violence leaves us emotionally numb. Images of conflicts, the refugee crisis, ecological disasters, and political unrest can be seen in the same spaces where we seek relaxation. Just as we are spectators of relaxing videos, films, and series, we become spectators of real events happening right now.

We can therefore compare the position of spectators to how we experience cinema. In the cinema, we sit in the dark and witness stories of people who suffer, fight, lose, and die. We feel the tension and we feel empathy, but our position remains outside the frame, without participating. The story unfolds, whether we are truly watching or not.

But film also has the power to challenge the distance between the viewer and the one being watched. Film confronts the spectator with unseen, ignored realities, and motivates us to look closer at lives that are marginalized and experiences that remain hidden.

In this series of films, we want to start precisely from that paradoxical position: the spectator as witness, but also as voyeur. Within this theme, we want to play with what it means for the viewer to watch violence and conflict without the possibility, or the will, to intervene.

Through uncomfortable questions, this film series turns the spectator into an accomplice: when does watching become a form of distance, and when does it transform into a form of involvement? And what does it mean when we remain seated, just like in the cinema, while the story continues?

On one side of the wall, an idyllic family life unfolds, while on the other side, one of the greatest atrocities in Western history is taking place. In *The Zone of Interest*, Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their family live right next to the concentration camp. They try to create a perfect world there, while not only ignoring the atrocities but also actively contributing to them and profiting from them.